


A voice shining like nacre

by ScriptaManent



Series: Voices in the woods [1]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Dungeons & Dragons, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Daishou isn't such a bad guy really, Fluff, Gen, Kenma is a mage, Kuroo is a rogue, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-18
Updated: 2020-09-18
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:14:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26528068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScriptaManent/pseuds/ScriptaManent
Summary: There was a voice, trapped in a bottle, floating in the middle of a fountain. And there was a rogue, walking nearby, looking for his next mischief. The rogue took the bottle. The voice asked for help.
Relationships: Hint at Kuroo Tetsurou & Daishou Suguru, Kozume Kenma/Kuroo Tetsurou
Series: Voices in the woods [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1928968
Comments: 8
Kudos: 29





	A voice shining like nacre

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, I'm back with a DND/Fantasy fic!  
> Just so you know, there's a mention of water and drowning but nothing bad really happens.

The bard’s voice travelled through the main place, impossible to miss or to ignore, for it would burst anyone’s eardrums for miles around. Even though the guy had the pretty looks of his kind, the siren blood that flowed in his veins had probably been diluted with too much human inheritage for his voice to be any effective. When he was supposed to attract unsuspicious humans, all that he did was pushing them to run away.

All but Kuroo. The man didn’t care. He had lived in Nekoma village his whole life. He knew everything there was to know about it, from the tiniest creaks in the stone-faced houses down to the exact location of each patch of medicinal plants that grew in the nearby forest — and of course, he knew every person’s business and every one of their secrets.

Therefore, the pinkish bottle that floated in the middle of the fountain immediately caught his eyes — well, his  _ eye _ , actually, the only valid one.

He rushed to it, skillfully balancing himself on the moss-covered walls of the fountain, and fished the bottle with an expert grip.

Kuroo glanced around, once again grateful for Oikawa’s dissonant melody. When he was sure that nobody had seen him, he swiped his new possession under his cloak and walked away.

* * *

Kuroo’s house didn’t look like much at first glance. It was a stony house like all the other stony houses, stretching the village’s frontier too close to the Seijoh forest. It was a quiet neighbourhood, perfect for sneaky witches and shady travellers and trades that were usually made under the table in the back of a crowded inn — perfect for a cunning rogue like him.

On the shelves that lined the walls lay rows and rows of potions, grimoires, daggers, horns and other rare treasures he had amassed over his twenty years of life. All of these he would keep until someone showed interest in them or their likes, save for the giant mountain cat’s claw hanging above the door. That was Kuroo's job, how he earned his money, collecting and trading and selling rare items to peasants and kings alike. He could find about anything, given enough time — a magical artefact to heal a daughter, a deadly poison to kill a prince.

Kuroo drew the curtains close. He threw his dark cloak on his bed, and pulled a stool to sit on and examine the bottle in candlelight. This was for sure something that he had never seen in his life.

The glass shone pink under the dancing light, patterned like mother-of-pearl. Kuroo could hardly see through its swirling gleam, but he could tell without a doubt that there was something trapped inside of the bottle. Whether it was a message, a charm or a curse was still to be determined.

He smiled to himself, a challenging smirk, and uncorked the bottle without further precautions.

“Can you hear me?” a voice immediately rose, incorporeal and distant.

Kuroo raised an eyebrow, turning the bottle between his hands. The pink glow was pulsing like a heartbeat, following the low intonations of the voice.

“Who are you?” Kuroo hazarded.

It felt silly to speak to a bottle, but the rogue had had a conversation with a talking tree only a few days ago, so nothing was really out of the ordinary there.

“Oh, someone picked up,” the voice said with a relieved sigh. “I, um, we need help to get out of somewhere…”

“Kenma, let me speak!” someone else intervened loudly, nearly screaming into the bottle, bursting Kuroo’s eardrums in the process.

“Lev, I’m the one controlling the spell,” the first person — Kenma — opposed.

He sounded irritated, and somehow it made it all the more interesting to the rogue — funny, even.

“Oh, so you’re a mage,” Kuroo purred, rolling the message-bearing item between his hands to examine it more closely. “Judging by the weakness of the spell, you’re a newbie, right? I suppose you went on a quest unprepared and got in trouble?”

There was a short silence on the other side of the line, followed by a shuffling sound.

“Kenma is a great mage!” a third voice intervened, fierce and confident. “Without him, I would have died three times!”

“Four,” Kenma corrected, and the tone of his voice made Kuroo laugh.

“So, tell me, what’s this all about?” the latter asked.

It was the third person who answered, speaking so quickly that Kuroo nearly had trouble following him.

“I offered Kenma and Lev to go on a quest together, and on the way we met that scary-looking guy, Daishou, but he actually offered his help since the three of us pretty much are new to this — oh, I’m Hinata Shouyou, by the way! I’m a paladin! And Lev’s a ranger! But he’s not very good at it…”

“I had a bad feeling about this guy,” Kenma mumbled somewhere behind Hinata, and Kuroo couldn’t tell whether he was talking about the ranger or about Daishou.

“—and then we were in the cavern—” Hinata continued, and Kuroo didn’t bother to ask about the bit of information he had missed in-between. “—and Daishou was supposed to convince the dragon to give us this gem, and she would have agreed, but at the last moment he stole it and blamed us and now we’re in some dark place and there’s water and I’m pretty sure it’s rising up…”

“I’m glad I’m taller than you, at least I’ll have more time before I drown…” Lev mused out loud.

Kuroo flicked a look at the bottle in his hand. Its light was fading at an alarming rate.

“Are you trapped in there?” he asked in a hurry, staring at the item with a concerned frown.

“Why do you think we’d be rotting in a dirty well?” Kenma groaned under his breath, and Kuroo snickered at the sarcastic tone.

Daishou… A dragon… Kuroo processed the information quickly. Judging by the mage’s level, he was probably not able to open a portal very far from his location, so that meant there had to be an abandoned well somewhere around the main place of Nekoma village. In one direction was the forest, in the other spread mountains.

“The dragon, it was Saeko, right? The cavern at the eastern frontier with Seijoh forest?”

As they kept speaking, the pulsation in the bottle slowed down, the glow weakened, reducing to a faint glimmer at the heart of the bottle. 

“Oi, Kenma — that’s your name, right?” Kuroo pressed, his brows furrowing deeper. “Break the spell, you’re too weak to keep it up.”

“Are you going to help us?” the mage still insisted.

“Yeah, I’ll find you. Now break the spell before you collapse and you drown.”

The pink light in the bottle faded out, like a flame licking the last millimeters of a candle wick before it drowned in wax. In Kuroo’s hand remained a classic glass bottle. There was nothing left of Kenma’s magic in it.

* * *

Any other day, Kuroo would have skillfully passed the buck to the first person he would have met. He wasn’t usually one to help people out of the kindness of his heart. He always had something in mind — a rare scroll he could get his hand on, a prized gem he could sell a good price to royalty — but this time, Kuroo had nothing to get out of the exchange.

And still, there he was, on his way to town to ask people if they had ever heard of a well around Saeko’s cavern.

He could probably have asked Daishou but he didn’t bother looking for him. They were colleagues, in a way, both rogues who had been raised in the same guild, disciples of the same master, but they had parted ways long ago. They had always been like rivals. Even to this day, they kept robbing each other whenever the other wasn’t looking. It was tradition, at this point.

Music rose to Kuroo’s ears, and he found the bard near the fountain where he had left him. Oikawa wasn’t singing anymore, instead playing his lyre with astonishing dexterity.

“Hey, you dropped the lute?” Kuroo greeted him, a smirk playing at the corners of his lips.

“Traded it for this. I like the cords better. Actually, it’s a funny story, I got it from a very cute dryad—”

“I don’t really have time for a tale right now,” the rogue cut him off, earning himself an offended glare from the other. “But have you heard a rumour about an abandoned well somewhere around? Apparently some idiots got trapped in there by Daishou.”

Oikawa studied him a second, and he arched an amused eyebrow. “And you decided to help them? What is it you’re getting out of it this time? Let me guess, a rare scroll?”

Kuroo lifted his chin, looking down on the other with a defiant eye. “Nothing.”

“Nothing?!” Oikawa’s hand slipped on the cords of his instrument, playing a dissonant note. “Why, then?”

Kuroo shrugged. To be honest, he wasn’t quite sure himself.

It turned out the bard had indeed heard about an old well — a story he had gotten from a water spirit that visited the fountain from time to time. It was in a remote part of the forest where Kuroo rarely wandered, not far from the cavern and at the edge of a river that streamed down the land. That was probably where the water was coming from.

Above the trees, the sky was grey and ominous, threatening, and Kuroo picked up his pace. They were in the middle of autumn, and the region was known for its long and pouring rains. If the river came to flood, the three idiots would be dead by the time the rogue would reach them.

He clenched his teeth when the first drop fell on his cloak.

* * *

Fortunately, it didn’t take too long for Kuroo to find the three adventurers. All he had had to do was to find the cavern and follow the screams.

The well was only a few meters away from the river, a mere hole in a shallow part of the bank — what kind of idiot had thought it would be any useful to build one here was beyond Kuroo.

“If one of you says one more word, I rise the level to the ceiling and make sure we all die,” someone in the pit — Kenma, Kuroo presumed — threatened in a deadly serious tone.

Immediately, everything fell quiet.

A smirk on his face, Kuroo knocked on the thick piece of wood that covered the well.

“Bottle idiots emergency rescue here,” he announced. “I’m gonna try to make the lid slide but I’ll need some help. Mage-guy, do you know any levitating spells?”

“My name is  _ Kenma _ ,” the other growled. “I can try and lift it a bit but I don’t have much power left.”

“You don’t say,” Kuroo mocked under his breath. “On three,” he added louder, positioning his hands on the side of the lid and anchoring his feet in the mud.

Damn it, he was a rogue, not a barbarian. His domain was stealth and cunning, not brute strength. He should have asked Yamamoto to come and give him some help.

Beneath him, the mage started to count. “One.”

The lid buzzed with magic, as if someone was trying to test its weight.

“Two,” Kuroo replied.

Water tugged at the back of his heel and he clenched his teeth.

“Three!” the two of them said in unison.

The rogue pushed on his arms and nearly fell into the well when the lid flew several feet away, light as a feather. He caught himself on the edge of the pit and stared wide-eyed at the three adventurers looking up at him. A red-haired paladin covered in bruises and grinning with the power of two suns, perched on the shoulders of a silver-haired elfling whose faithful bow had been discarded in the water. And with them, a dyed-haired mage that glared up at him, pale and sweating in his shredded royal clothes.

“What the hell, you’re the prince?!” Kuroo exclaimed.

Kenma stopped his spell with an exhausted huff and averted his gaze, hiding behind his long, unmistakable hair.

“You’re the  _ prince _ ?!” the rogue repeated again, before he burst out laughing. “I can’t believe I saved Prince Kozume Kenma, heir of Edo, from a well. How did you get lost so far from your castle?”

“We followed Lev,” Hinata informed in a genuine voice, pointing at the elfling he was still perched on.

The rogue laughed even louder.

“Get us out of here,” the prince grunted, flicking another glare at his saviour. “I’m cold,” he added lower, defeated, as he looked away again.

Kuroo let out another chuckle, this one softer, and got back to his feet to grab the rope he had brought with him. As he tied it to a solid willow tree, he realised with surprise that the smile hadn’t left his face.

* * *

“Kuro?”

The rogue lifted his gaze from the scroll he was studying — he had borrowed this one from Daishou when he was away for another quest. The other wouldn’t know it was missing before a few weeks at least.

In front of him, Kenma was watching him closely. The candle light was casting dancing shadows on his delicate face, and once more, Kuroo lost track of time into these amber eyes.

When had the great prince of Edo become the little prince of Nekoma, nobody could tell, but truth was Kenma now spent more time with Kuroo than in his castle. He didn’t like the ever-watching attention that his servants gave him over there, and his time with the rogue was by far more restful and quiet, comfortable. 

Kenma bent over the table, reaching out to brush aside the dark strand of hair that covered Kuroo’s right eye. The scar that it concealed was pink and old, but it was as ugly as one could be.

“What happened to your eye?”

Kuroo stayed still, looking right into the mage’s eyes, no trace of amusement on his face. He leaned backward, out of Kenma’s reach, and rolled the scroll back into shape. For a long time, he didn’t say anything, but Kenma nonetheless waited for him to answer.

“A stupid accident when I was still an apprentice,” Kuroo eventually declared. “Daishou and I went on a quest that was too difficult for us.”

He glanced at the feline claw that had etched his face, pinned above the door. He had been lucky that it had only touched his eye. It was on that day that Daishou had decided to leave the guild; on that day that he had claimed nothing good would ever come out of them being friends.

They were fire and oil, destructive, and dangerous if kept too close to each other.

In spite of all, Kuroo remained convinced they still cared about each other.

“I don’t think even the most powerful magic could ever restore your sight,” Kenma said slowly, walking around the table to brush the scar once more.

Kuroo exhaled a long breath, closing his eye to enjoy the contact of the cold fingertips upon his skin.

“I could probably make it look better, though… If that’s what you wanted.”

Kuroo’s heart beat faster at the thought.

“Are you sure it’s not an attempt at disfiguring me?” the rogue couldn’t help but joke to cover the stupid hope that pierced through his voice.

Kenma traced the outline of the scar down to Kuroo’s cheekbone, following the uneven skin without flinching.

“Could be,” he teased, and there was a smile in his voice. He was serious again when he continued. “Would you let me try?”

Kuroo swallowed his saliva. “Go ahead.”

Kenma took a step back and sat on the table, pulling Kuroo closer so that he would be at the right height. The rogue kept his valid eye closed, following Kenma’s movements with infinite trust. He had no idea when his relationship with Kenma had changed from polite interest, to complicity, to nearly living together days and nights, be it at home or miles away.

The mage tilted Kuroo’s chin up, and even without looking at him, Kuroo knew he was grinning at how easily Kuroo complied.

“You’re enjoying this a bit too much, Kenma,” he smirked.

“Maybe I am.”

He placed his palm over the other’s scar, his magic bathing the room in blurry patches of blue, and Kuroo felt it seep into his flesh, remodelling it like an artist shaping clay.

After a moment, the light turned to pink tones, then it faded completely.

“Not bad,” Kenma eventually commented in a low voice.

His thumb caressed Kuroo’s smooth skin, tracing what was left of the scar — only a pale mark remained; it would shine like nacre under the right light.

Kenma had practised the spell over and over again, for weeks, on fruits, on animals, on people and on plants, but it had been worth it. Even though he wasn’t that great of a mage itself, he turned out to be a formidable stratege, and a pretty good healer.

“Kuro?” he called again.

The other opened his eyelids, raising an eyebrow. His right eye was blind but for the first time in years, he could feel it.

“Take me on a quest, next time.”

Kuroo’s heart hammered in his chest.

“You sure you want to do one with me?” the rogue couldn’t help but ask.

A grin stretched the corners of Kenma’s lips, and he bent forward to press his lips against the scar on the other’s face, holding onto his shoulders not to lose his balance.

“Certain,” he confirmed, pulling back to look at Kuroo’s face.

There was an amused light in Kenma’s eyes, a rare sight that brought a pleased smile to Kuroo’s face.

He reached for Kenma’s arm, curling his fingers around his thin wrist.

“Depends,” Kuroo lilted, his grin widening when Kenma’s eyes fell to his lips. “What can I get out of it?”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading, I hope you liked it! I actually fell in love with this universe, so there will be more coming (just with a focus on different characters)!
> 
> [Twitter](https://twitter.com/AngstWeaver) | [Other Haikyuu fics](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScriptaManent/works?fandom_id=758208)


End file.
